I first off want to say, I enjoy the fact that you guys/gals are trying to improve the game by making changes. I love that part of this, but these changes you've made to warring are completely stupid. While you've had the best intentions doing the changes, they've really made war SUCK. I hope you've seen how things are going between this current MD/SOL 'vs' SOF war and can see that the changes have HUGELY impacted how wars are fought and how the "win" conditions of a war are going to change from what we've previously known. It's now not as important to get a tagkill as it is to level them and limit their growth, keeping them stagant.

Now my questions are:

1) Have the changes that you've made delivered the results you were trying to achieve? (As in making a FS weaker or w/e your goal was)
2) Do you have intentions of making changes next set? If so, do you plan on returning things to the way they were, or just improving on the current changes?
3) What do you now classify as a win or a loss in a war, where killing is underpowered, and leveling is overpowered?
4) When you guys are making changes to the game, how do you determine what you will change? Are you taking advice from players, or just making them based off your game play or what you see happening?


With this being said, These are ONLY personal opinions. I'm sure others have their own opinions of things and what they think. That's expected as none of us are the same. Please don't turn this thread into something stupid by being a dumb fluff and trolling it. Be serious, express your opinion on the changes, and let your voice be heard.

Thanks

Watch him get a 4 years ban now.

lol. I'm waiting for the Mods to answer

Qz thinks of an idea, pang says it sucks but does nothing to change it, martian then gives his blessing to Qz, and Qz claims it was made by council.

That is basically how this game is created for you! Since martain is a top tier player... *choke* sorry I can't type that with a straight face.

No offense martain.

They dont ban for polite posts. Dont be dumb.

Randy, they did exactly what they wanted. It was the idea and it seems idea works as they wanted. Not sure if its good or bad though.

I can't comment on that particular change and I'm not speaking on behalf of qz and the admins, but there is generally a lot of consultation for most changes. Before I became a mod, qz would often bring ideas to me to get my input. I would also direct him to other individuals I think could add to the discussion.

Most of these discussions and ideas end up on the dev board where all the mods and other individuals involved in development can weigh in. Qz doesn't implement things without talking them over first.

thats not true tella, most recent changes were not put up on the dev board for the other moderators to look at, well not until after they were put in place

Warster, what tellarion saying is that, just like before, from the beginning, EVO members always had a sneak preview and input into game changes.

It gave them advantages to knowing what's coming, and be prepared, much like how they have every in game formula direct plugged into their Alliance site.

So did Laf players often Jelly.

If you could answer my questions with a 1,2,3,4 format, I would appreciate it. Don't give me a blanket answer, either tell me that you DO NOT want to answer the question and you prefer not to give us insight to future changes, or answered fully by the people who implemented them.

Please and thank you!

This is not true. Never did I see a post from QZ in Evo site telling us of any upcoming changes, unless posted in Announcements.
Not even a single sneak peek in Leader's board. lol

Well then direct questions to the admins not the moderators then lol,

1. I believe they wanted to make is less damaging to a player if they get killed, so yes I would say they met their goal
2. As far as I can see, no major changes to it are planned


3. No idea how they see it now for war wins, guess networth Maybe........ I dont know


4. They seem to talk to a select group of players and disregard everyone else,


But hey that's my take on this.

Warster +1

the game has evolved to the point that the players aren't going to have any idea what the rules are going to be for any given set until after the set is over? or are the changes announced the day the set starts?

Here are 5 quick ways to improve the game without resorting to nuclear option changes:

1) Cap restart bonuses at 25%. That is plenty for a well built country and still maintains a sting if you die.
2) Don't allow special attacks in the first 2 weeks. Or get even cleverer and randomise the date when special attacks can be available. Make it a 12-18 day window before special attacks get enabled and the OOP first strike is killed, early suiciders are negated and it is impossible to organise / save turns for the knockout first strike until the protection period is expired - at which point all alliances will be on even footing. (Allow special attacks on a country vs country basis, requiring that country A declare war on country B)
3) Just make it impossible to make more than 1 attack per second per country. That will extend kill runs and make walling more prevalent (unless you have a critical mass of turns - in which case, well done to the attacking team)
4) Make FA packages public knowledge. Make them searchable in the news. FA is always allowed in any war, but make sure those alliances that get outside assistance are accountable. This will encourage more strictly 1 on 1s, create more grudges between enemy factions if they choose external FA and lessen the chance that someone will get FAed into the top 10 when they don't deserve it.
5) Come up with a way to score wars. Please. This game is fluff as a purely netgaining experience. People love the grudges, the wars, killing countries and the politics. Come up with a way to rate a war performance and have the core indicator of victory based around tag killing.

cheers

.. and dont ban Randy for 4 years for questioning the game changes and the mods.

ta.

What I'm saying is you don't know fluff, so stop talking. Often, my 'advance knowledge' of changes was by a few hours before he posted them for everyone to see. Any Evo member(or any of our allies with access) can confirm that this stuff isn't posted anywhere in site. Qz talks to me about potential changes in order to get feedback from an alliance leader. He has done the same with many many many other people over the years, including xinhuan and dragon. I personally referred him to auspiggy, sigma and a few others as well.

And that is for the theorycrafting and bouncing ideas back and forth, not the final changes. Until I became a mod, I had at most 3 hours advanced knowledge of changes to be implemented.

IMO CARPET WINS.

With a non-trolling response he makes valid points that I feel most can live with / agree with (at least to a point).


Thank you Randy for posting a message openly criticising the game admin without it bashing or being offensive. All these "New Changes Suck" threads do no help the game. They annoy the mods who do their best to spice and add to this staled style of game play. If only you dumb trolls would be thankful for what you have instead of fluffing all the time.

Dear Mods - Please delete any response that is not positively motivated (even if negatively toned)

If anyone bans randy for posting this, I'll unban him. As long as discussion remains civil, I see no reason for anyone to be banned.

As far as this particular change, I think the overall idea was to prolong wars a bit more, lessen the impact of the FS, and generally make it a bit less punishing to be killed. Yes, some people have the time and ability to wall at a moments notice, but MOST players don't. It's kinda lame to spend hours and hours building your country up and then have it taken out in 20 seconds. If you've been paying attention to the changes over the past year or so, you'll see a progression of different ideas all working towards that goal. Make wars a bit more even, and make it so the average joe still has a chance to enjoy wars without stressing so much. Those dedicated wallers can still absolutely dominate and are still unkillable.

Also, from my talks with Qz and my suggestions for Express, he doesn't like instituting hard caps on things; for example, limiting special attacks in the first few weeks. I've tried to think of ways to make it possible to do the same activities, but make it cost more resources(ie military losses or more turns required).

As far as 'winning' is concerned, how did you all define winning before the changes this set? Is it getting the tagkill? Then why do people still fight when they've been tagkilled? Is it creating an impossible nw gap? Again, people still keep plugging away even after that point. Win conditions have always been a completely political construct, so I'm not sure how the changes ruin the idea of 'winning' a war...

Since this is an alliance server I think we should limit wars to be formal affairs between alliances. This wouldn't be hard to implement. Just let the tag admin have a "declare war" for alliances. When declaring war, special attacks are opened between the two alliances in question and those two ONLY. To declare peace, both alliances must choose peace. When declaring peace, a victor is determined by total net worth remaining between the two alliances and that stat should be saved along the regular nw tables. Easy to implement, and very much in synch with how the game works now! (Nw = score)

A potential bonus option:
Only let tag admins for 5+ man tags declare war. Bam! 90% of random suiciders are dealt with!

That's a good idea and I think it's somewhere in the pipe. Question though: What about untagged players or those in <5 man spam tags? Are they just prohibited from using special attacks? Yes, there are the career suiciders that we all despise, but what about the poor noob who doesn't know what he's doing and uses whatever options he has to deal with the bottomfeeding?

I am not a mod but as tella said qz has asked for my opinion or suggestions for some of the changes over the past few sets. To answer the questions in my opinion (i am not talking for qz, etc)

1) Have the changes that you've made delivered the results you were trying to achieve? (As in making a FS weaker or w/e your goal was)

Ans - My understanding has been that the changes were intended to make war competitive for the duration of a reset. OOP wars sucked as people quickly lost interest where there was a large imbalance (whether NW, membership size, etc). Similarly, as already mentioned, if you spend weeks building a country for it to die in 20 sec and then have to start from scratch is annoying. Based on this some of the changes i believe were made to try and draw out a KR so people have a change to wall, the time based DR changes over the previous sets i think did do this to a degree. Did it do what the admins wanted exactly, no idea. The NW ratios affecting the losses to the attacker and defender, i think does work towards balancing out NW differences to a degree, once again no idea if it is as envisaged by the admins.

2) Do you have intentions of making changes next set? If so, do you plan on returning things to the way they were, or just improving on the current changes?

Ans - No idea. Haven't had any ideas bounced off me or suggestions asked for. I have been working on a warbot for PDM which qz asked if I could provide a version which will be available for all EE clans. I intend to do so but due to RL time is limited.

3) What do you now classify as a win or a loss in a war, where killing is underpowered, and leveling is overpowered?

Ans - Don't think this is for the admins to determine. They don't provide war rankings. The player community decides i think, someone could "win" a war by having killed the most countries, tag killed the alliance, and have a massive NW advantage. Alternatively, they could have done all that and shafted all their allies, and committed political suicide. So do the stats count or the way that alliance is viewed? Did the alliance who lost by stats make the point they were after? etc etc *Shrugs* this is a semi sober, semi awake post :P

4) When you guys are making changes to the game, how do you determine what you will change? Are you taking advice from players, or just making them based off your game play or what you see happening?

Ans - I was asked for ideas and opinions on ideas by qz. Why the admins choose to target a certain aspect of the game i dont know.

Cheers,
AusPiggy

Erian, I think using total NW to determine a winner based upon stats is only viable if both alliances are the same size. Average NW would be better to cater for differences in alliance size. I like the other idea though but I also like the idea of having pacts implemented through the tag admin functionality (e.g. if there is a uNAP between two alliances, you can't hit that other alliance at all, if a country detags they cant suicide on another alliance for a tag admin defined time period, etc), but that isn't the topic of this thread ;)

I think that the alliance server should be about alliances, with little consideration for those who are not in one. And special attacks or no, we both know that whatever a noob does in retaliation, he still gets farmed into the ground every day. I think we should steer beginners towards other servers, or encourage more tags to do what we in LaF do; when we get angry messages that are not just bile and hate we try to recruit the "farmland" player.


I disagree with the first part. I always thought TNW was the only really important metric in this game. Just like individual success can be boiled down to one value, so can alliance success. I don't mind that we have an average networth score and a member score, both say something about an alliance, but to me they are mostly irrelevant in determining the total power of a tag. For a historic example, SL and Rage were very strong in ANW and Members respectively for a long time, but neither were a great force in the server. (yes Ragers, I know you were quite strong at some point, but you were never ranked as the #1 alliance by any unbiased observer, while you were certainly #1 in the Members stat) I just think TNW is the only single value that correlates well with the total "real" power of an alliance. In netgaining or in/after war.

I do think it would be sweet with all the other stuff like in game pacts, suicider protection, etc. My suggestion was tailored specifically to make this change easy to implement, as I don't think this game generates enough money for qz to make a living of it, and his time is thus limited :(

who is martain?
At least type my name right when addressing me :P
For the record I've never *ever* in my entire history playing this game claimed to be good at netting so please don't insult me:P

And you are quite incorrect. QZ does run stuff by me in terms of how would I react to it if i were running a warring tag and also how would I personally abuse it. Otherwise most of my answers are based on the answers I get from other alliance leaders/players who are active in this game in a variety of capacities, just not necessarily on this board.

If pang were to say something is a horrible idea then it would probably be dropped then and there.

@Jelly: I also talked to players in Sol and SoF and occasionally some other tags regarding the upcoming changes and would be more than willing to talk to leaders from any other tag that expressed interest.

And for the record, constructive criticism/suggestions are paid attention to.
There are a lot of accusations out there that we are tailoring changes to help certain tags over others which is blatantly false. Sometimes leaders from various tags make suggestions which knowingly/unknowing will benefit their tag in particular, mostly because it's because they are most familiar with that playing style. I don't think it's typically a malicious thing but we want to be mindful of that.

heh

I'm not sure what the intent of these changes are, but being involved in this war these changes would make me favor OOP war even more than I used to. There isn't really a good way to remove huge stockpiles from countries, so the easiest way to win a war is cutoff their production at the very beginning of the set.

AB them OOP and outgrow them. Once a country has a huge stock, both killing and crippling aren't huge threats to a country.

I've seen a couple of you guys/gals post that the intention of the changes were to lengthen kill runs and basically help protect someone's investment they've made into their country. While I agree it is painful to put your whole 2 minutes a day into building a country up, just to have it destroyed, I don't agree with the changes personally. You have to remember the other 15 people who also put time into their country, who worked as a team, and cooperated well enough to destroy your country in 30 seconds or less. Those kill runs don't just happen easily, they are well coordinated and administered with flawlessness. How about giving them props for being so awesome, rather than penalizing them by giving the guy they killed 75% of his stuff back?

I agree with kalick, unable to destroy their stock now makes me want to OOP war more than ever now. Killing your ability to get stock with the surprise FS versus letting you get stock and only being able to kill a porition of it seems way more viable now.

With the changes it seems that war has become almost a waste of time. War clans will have to turn into sucide clans and just AB everyone until they run out of money then kill them.

the restart changes only benefit two groups

unprepared groups that get first striked

and suiciders

ironically the second groups damage to the first will more than outweigh the benefit

the war tags will probably start suiciding pansy netters until the rules are changed, its got to be more fun than fighting a war like this

id consider ceasefiring and doing that if i was sof/sol

and if i was a member there id consider not tagging up my restart and attempting to fix war rather than win the current one

If this remains true, then I will have no choice but to find something else to occupy my time.

I enjoy war but to kill a country and have it come back a few turns later almost as strong doesnt make much sense to me at all. Whats the point in killing?

never thought i'd say this...


but...

good post, dagga

OOPS! DID NOT MEAN TO POST HERE. SCREEN JUMPED AND I ACCIDENTALLY CLICKED THE BUTTON.

ALSO, TODAY I HAVE LEARNED THAT IT IS POSSIBLE TO MAKE A POST WHICH IS ENTIRELY BLANK. THAT MEANS I DON'T HAVE TO LEARN ANYTHING ELSE TODAY! HOORAY! I LOVE IT WHEN I CAN START DRINKING AT 11:00 AM!

Seems to me that the core of your complaints are that the changes have caused the way warring is conducted to change "too much". So let me ask you this: Why is it so important for the way people war to stay the same? What exactly is so wrong with moving more to a crippling/growth based war dynamic rather than one that simply revolves around killing other countries?

Most other gaming communities would consider it a progressive change, since completely killing off other people's accounts/hard work is generally frowned upon in most multiplayer games...

The intentions were as follows:
1) To weaken FS so that a tag can get fs'd and still mount a CS even if blindsided.
2) To make restarting easier and to encourage players to play longer. If you make someone restart from scratch more than 2-3 times they will stop playing for the set.
3) To not nerf killing in a way that makes warchats frustrating. Making kills harder/walling easier simply discourages a warchat as does having warchats that take a long time. Most players don't want to hang around in irc for an hour while waiting to hit. Limiting hitting speed also frustrates warchats/hitting. Yes this is rewarding the lowest common denominator more and the people who can wall quickly less.
4) To not have a tag completely knocked out of a war in 2 days and the entire tag effectively stop playing for the remainder of a reset (could be 4+ weeks)

And as H4 said above. Consider that with the restart changes, suiciding doesn't do as much either.

regarding trife's post: 2, 3, and 4 are political issues and are rather arbitrary. While well meaning, 2 doesn't stop early wars at all and makes a suiciding issue worse (I run an all jetter and you can't kill me early set) also it doesn't stop warring. 3 is just annoying. I personally wouldn't want to run through 90 turns clicking once per second (see my comments above). 4 is purely a political issue. I personally think that having hidden FA adds something to the game.
5. it's called NW differential or ANW differential before/after the war. We've been doing it for years.
1. upon what are you basing 25%.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Also, imho the changes should not be geared to the benefit of the top ranking netting players/large alliances. That's why DR, GDI, oil, readiness were put into the game..

Nothing is wrong with progressive changes if it makes things more fun. Not all changes are going to be good for the game or make it more enjoyable to play.

Relly, what is the point of warring if you kill someone and they come back almost as strong as they were before in as little as 15 turns? So, no more tag kills, just cripple cripple cripple?

@Randy: You can destroy stock. The other way of looking at it s to change the spy ops and attacks to do more damage to stock than they currently do... just saying.


1) Have the changes that you've made delivered the results you were trying to achieve?
When we gather hard data and look we will be able to tell.

2) Do you have intentions of making changes next set? If so, do you plan on returning things to the way they were, or just improving on the current changes?
Changes: yes. Returning things to they way they were? No. Compromising between the two? possibly. We haven't really had the discussion yet and it depends on (1)


3) What do you now classify as a win or a loss in a war, where killing is underpowered, and leveling is overpowered?
Personally: TNW at the end of the war. but that's just my opinion.


4) When you guys are making changes to the game, how do you determine what you will change? Are you taking advice from players, or just making them based off your game play or what you see happening?
Al of the above. Also based on a desire to move the game in a certain direction.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I like the sound of martain. Sounds exotic.

there was someone with that nick many years ago :P

based on martain's posts it was mARTIAN.

really??? and i thought i knew you...

You seem to be missing my point Ruth. You have argued against me by pointing out how pointless it is to kill under the new war changes. Meanwhile my point was that perhaps it is a good thing that killing isn't the optimal way to war now. Perhaps... people should try something different (which coincidentally will also be more efficient/effective at keeping your opponent down).

All I hear here are complaints about deviation from the status quo (killing as the primary mechanism to engage in war). Sorry but that isn't a valid argument. When games change you have to adapt and learn, and that is good otherwise games become far too stale, which has clearly been on the biggest problems with this game.

Killing isn't very effective in war anymore. Ok, perhaps you should try a more effective strategy then, rather then complaining that you can't do it the same way you've always done it...

its because people have tried it and dont like it H4, people are complaining after how many weeks of war??

I also think what ruth was saying, in not so many words, is that the users decide what changes are made because they will quit playing. No players, no game.

You can make changes but you better hope the players accept it otherwise you may end up with even less players.

You buffed suciders, good job.

Martain, don't make fun of me because I kant spell.

But perhaps this user base isn't the best representation of what constitutes good changes Requiem.
If they are looking to grow the game, that is a very different angle than tailoring the game to suit the desires of a small group of very long standing players, who look at game changes from a very different lens than a new player would.

Essentially, current players are more interested in maintaining the status quo, even if the status quo would be considered vastly inferior by a third party onlooker. The current player base is highly bias in their perception of game changes. To continue to taylor to that base is not a good growth strategy. Allowing some players to leave cause they don't like the changes may be a good growth strategy if the changes lead to more fresh blood flowing in.

LoL so you are basically slapping the current player base in the face because you think you can get more people to play?

HAHAHA

I welcome growth of the game btw.